A typical enterprise network seems to continuously expand to include an ever increasing number of separate and heterogeneous devices, such as clients, web servers, load balancers, routers, switches, bridges, application servers, storage servers, database servers, and so forth. These different devices may be connected using various types of wired and wireless communications media, arranged in various topologies and sub-networks, and communicate using different protocols. This collection makes communication across all devices a difficult task involving multiple types of connections, communication interfaces, and protocol translation interfaces.
In a reverse process, the heterogeneous devices typically found in an enterprise network are starting to coalesce into a single modular computing platform. For example, server blades are data processing systems or single board computers that plug into slots in a rack, also known as a chassis. The chassis may contain a backplane and/or an interconnect module with buses or communication lines interconnecting the slots in the rack. In addition, a chassis management module (CMM) may be plugged into the rack, for monitoring the resources within the chassis, for providing management warning or alerts, for receiving management directives, and for performing other administrative functions associated with the server blades. The chassis may also contain many other types of components or modules, such as shared power modules, storage blades containing hard disk drives, input/output (I/O) blades for optical or other types of I/O, and so forth. Each server blade within the chassis may implement some or all of the functionality traditionally implemented using separate devices in the enterprise network.
As with enterprise networks, communication across all devices within a modular computing platform may also be a difficult task involving multiple types of connections, communication interfaces, and protocol translation interfaces. Although enterprise networks are attempting to develop common communication schemes, however, data processing systems such as modular computing platforms are still limited to communicating using disparate and proprietary protocols, such as the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) protocol and System Management Bus (SMB) protocol, for example. This may limit or complicate internal as well as external communications. This communication challenge may be further exacerbated as modular computing platforms are becoming abstracted into virtual machines (VM) and virtualization technology (VT) systems.